The Contracts of Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This book considers the advantages of describing fictions as governed by a set of social contracts. It combines current cognitive research with attention to the historical context of works of imagination to argue against the claim that fictions corrupt clear thinking and provide, at best, inert pleasures. The chapters explore the different ways creative work in media from statues to stage plays helps to maintain cultural homeostasis. Like the social contracts of law, language, kinship, and money, the social contracts of fiction are constructed and continually revised within communities. They teach us how to think about the stuff of daily life, animate and inanimate, as abstractions. It is because our brains have evolved to toggle between concrete tokens and abstract types that we can speak, trade, and live together. The discussions of lyrics, portrait paintings, religious relics, plays, and films explore the ways fictions work within culturally constructed and historically specific frames that since Plato have been used to mark fiction’s exclusion from daily concerns—and challenge this assumption. Rather than mark these fictions as peripheral, the framing effects of their genres, styles, and of the places where we experience them—theaters and museums, for example—afford communities the cognitive time and space to reconsider and revise. An extended consideration of The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet in the context of judicial instability in early modern London suggests how the balances and imbalances of fiction, seen as scaled-up versions of life-sustaining homeostasis, might just enable restorative and revisionary thinking.

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